The UAE Tour Women, the second WorldTour stage race of 2026, is well underway in the Middle East, and right now, defending champion Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ) is in the throes, yet again, of battling for another overall victory. So, in some ways, it feels like business as usual for women’s cycling as another new season begins to unfold. Yet if only it were so simple.
With 12 years and counting as a professional, many of them at the highest level – it’s more than a decade since Longo Borghini took a breakthrough triumph at the 2013 Trofeo Alfredo Binda – fans are also well aware that in that time Longo Borghini has built herself a well-earned reputation as a shrewd observer and analyst of a lot of the underlying trends in the sport. And as things currently stand, she recognises that some elements of where women’s cycling is headed could not be more beneficial.
But, as it emerges in this interview with Cyclingnews, others also worry her considerably.
On the one hand, it’s true that the number of hours of television coverage continues to rise in women’s cycling, that the Tour de France Femmes reached record viewing figures in 2025 – up by 500,000 to a daily average of 2.7 million inside France – and that Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s spectacular Tour victory, long-awaited by the host country, all helped give cycling’s biggest bike race a significant boost in terms of coverage. However, Longo Borghini is also aware that what is a major success story in some respects has, in other ways, been accompanied by a financial and sporting drain on its foundations.
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